The present invention relates generally to the electrical, electronic, and computer arts, and more particularly relates to data storage and distribution.
With the prolific use of networking and cloud computing, data or other content is no longer restricted to residing on local storage devices. Rather, a modern trend, particularly for data that is shared among multiple users, is to utilize a large distributed system of servers, often referred to as a content delivery network (CDN), deployed in multiple data centers worldwide through the Internet for supplying content to end-users in an efficient manner. CDNs supply a large fraction of the Internet content available today, including web objects (e.g., text, graphics, URLs and scripts), downloadable objects (e.g., media files, software, documents), applications (e.g., e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, social networks, etc. In order to provide such content with high availability and high performance, physical data often needs to be duplicated within the network.
Replication of some data for the purpose of efficient distribution is presently being handled by proxy caches embedded within the Internet. A proxy cache will distribute, for example, video content to a selected region. In such a scenario, multiple copies of the same read-only data (e.g., video data) are located within proxy caches scattered throughout the world. Each proxy cache distributes requested data to its regional customers, thereby reducing network traffic congestion, latency and power consumption. However, while it is generally straightforward to propagate copies of read-only data through various proxy caches around the world, the same is not true for read/write data.